Almost 4 years ago to the date, hackers breached Bitfinex. It wasn’t the first Bitcoin hack or the biggest, but the thieves got away with a hefty sum of 119,756 BTC. At the time these coins were worth around $70 million bucks, but now the haul the hackers made off with is worth more than a billion dollars.
When the news broke, the entire cryptocurrency community was shaken. Many started to question the security of their exchanges of choice and the term “not your keys, not your coins,” really started to resonate throughout the space.
Zane Tackett was Director of Community & Product at Bitfinex at the time of the hack. He realized then that the cryptocurrency sector would have to make some changes in favor of security.
“The era of commingling customer bitcoin and all of the associated security exposures is over”, Tackett said.
“The trading community has long sought individually verifiable accounts without sacrificing security or performance. With the help of BitGo’s multi-signature technology, the Bitfinex team is very excited to be the first exchange in the world to automate Bitcoin settlements using ‘On-Blockchain’ customer segregated wallets.”
The changes Tackett alluded to have started to become more of common practice for cryptocurrency exchanges and there is now more urgency when discussing the line between privacy and security.
But just because new practices are more secure, it doesn’t mean Bitfinex will give up their attempts to find those responsible and recover as many lost coins as possible. In their latest attempt to crack this case, Bitfinex is willing to offer a pretty big bounty to anyone with information about the crime or the hackers.
The parameters of the bounty were released in a statement on Bitfinex.com.
“Those who put Bitfinex in contact with the hacker will receive 5% of the total property recovered (or equivalent funds or assets at current market values), and the hackers will receive 25% of the total property recovered (or equivalent funds or assets at current market values). Any payments made to those connecting Bitfinex with the hackers and the hackers themselves will be classified as costs of recovery of the stolen property.”
In total rewards could add up to an enormous sum.
“The aggregate rewards available under this programme could be worth up to approximately US$400 million at the current BTC price if all bitcoins are fully recovered.”
Bitfinex is even willing to deal with the hackers themselves. To confirm the identity of the hackers Bitfinex is asking for 1 satoshi to be sent from the wallet address responsible for the hack to a specific Bitfinex wallet.
To conclude their missive, Bitfinex stated that security is of the utmost importance to them and cited the recent Twitter hack as a reason for continued and heightened security diligence.
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